“I’ll be back”
by Ramsés Dávila-Luna at The Writer’s Cavern
I fell in love with the big screen at a very young age.
My uncle Porfirio drove my mother, brother, and me to Tijuana, México. The countdown was on for my immigration appointment, and I kept crying against a fence. “I don’t want them to give me an injection! I want to go back to America!” I kept telling my mother. Officials from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were going to take our fingerprints, photographs, and signatures. Somehow, I convinced myself they would inject me with a giant needle. There’s a picture of me crying that day, wearing a Mickey Mouse-themed USA shirt.
Later, we ended up in Zona Centro to kill time and wandered into a rundown movie theater called Cinelandia. The viewing rooms had no seats—just slabs of open cement—and were packed with standing-room-only crowds. The movie was projected onto a high ceiling. We entered a theater viewing room, where Predator (1987) was being replayed.
The jungle onscreen won me over. I marveled at the minigun spraying the forest line, trying to hit the unknown beast stalking the soldiers. “Like a chameleon… It uses the jungle,” Anna tells Dutch, helping the group understand what they’re up against. The atmosphere and tension mesmerized me. Something clicked inside me, and I immediately thought, “If someone can get paid to write a story and have their world built in real life, I want in.” As cigarette smoke drifted around me, I knew then I wanted to join the movie business someday.
Arnold Schwarzenegger became an emblem for me, and his onscreen aura reached new heights when I later saw him in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Decades later, as an intern at the California Capitol’s Press Office, I saw Schwarzenegger in real life. I’d spot the mysterious action star in the Executive Suite’s inner patio, smoking a big cigar, surrounded by his aides and his press secretary. Occasionally, he would pass by with his bodyguards near the press office.
I never actually met Arnold, but I took it as a sign from the universe that I got to see him up close. I think important moments revisit us. The kid at Cinelandia sent out heart energy that brought Schwarzenegger before me later in life; maybe a part of me turned him into the beast I needed to find, just like his character does in Predator (1987).
The last thing I remember from that Tijuana trip was all of us gathered around a table at a local restaurant. I bought a giant bottle of soda and accidentally left it on the roof of the car before hopping inside. At a stoplight, we saw the soda fall from the roof, and my uncle Porfirio laughed as he got out to retrieve it before we drove back to the USA. As a kid, I had no idea that years later I would see the man from that big screen in person.
Are my film dreams forever lost in the jungle, or will they someday collide with the monster that planted these goals in my head? As an adult, I still feel like I’m trudging through the jungle searching for those dreams, and unlike in Predator (1987), I have yet to even glimpse what that monster looks like. Yet there’s a younger version of me, still inside Cinelandia, telling this film dream: “I’ll be back.”
Copyright © 2026 The Writer's Cavern by Ramsés Dávila-Luna at The Writer’s Cavern LLC. All rights reserved.
